The index of refraction sets the amount of refraction, which differs depending on the density of the material the light is passing through. The refraction amount determines the visibility of the refraction.

Roughness in Cook-Torrance. Imagine the surface of an object is covered in tiny dimples, like the surface of a golf ball. Roughness is the depth of the divots. 0 roughness has zero depth for a perfectly smooth surface. 100 is very deep divots.

Adjusting specular reflectance (think of this as how deep a like ray goes into a material before bouncing. Not quite subsurface scattering, but close) and roughness change the look of a specular reflection, along with the reflection amount (master strength of specular reflection).

So, those three faders together affect how speculars look. Fresnel also affects speculars (providing a color cast as the object's angle, relative to the light, changes. The specular color also affects how the specular looks.

Turning up roughness should help give a more worn look. You can also turn down reflectance and reflection to dull the highlights.

Another option is creating a specular map, which requires the model having been UV wrapped (I think the Dalek is. Certainly its head is.).

For specular maps, I turn you over to Simon Jones who gave a great walk through in this old Hitfilm 2 tutorial. Skip to about 3:20..

Actually, just watch the whole thing. The interface is different, Hitfilm 2 doesn't have Cook-Torrance shading and Hitfilm 2 doesn't have individual parenting for animation groups, but this is still a great tutorial and covers a couple of more obscure settings like emissive color, goes over loading multi-part models and has other misc information that's good to know... For example, bringing in a "Normalized" model will scale it to fit a 500x500x500 box.

@GrayMotion I think it was for you that I typed up a breakdown of all the Cook-Torrance settings. Do you still have that? I'm too short on time to search my thousands of forum posts to find it, and probably too lazy to type it up again until I'm preparing the relevant Hit-U tutorial.

For example, the gold from the website you linked created a nice polished gold, but not the more matte painted gold from the show.

Would it be easier to create the material from scratch, or use those settings and adjust? To make it more accurate could I reduce the specular reflectivity to make it less mirror like, and then add roughness?

@Triem23 just looking at some reference photos of Daleks from the show, the default Dalek materials, with phong shading and no textures, seem to look quite good as the plastic material from the props. I also added a lot of diffuse reflectivity. It also seems quicker to render.

I might try this look for now, and do the animation test with some real footage. I'll then post it and see what you all think...

A true spherical wrap will work BETTER, because it will have full surrounding data, but a regular panoramic photo will work pretty well. I've even had shots where I didn't have a sphere or linear panorama so I made a comp shot twice as wide as the the BG footage, moved the BG footage into it, duplicated it twice, shifted the duplicates left and right to fill frame and flipped the duplicate scale to -100% on the X-axis to make it seamless.

Unless you're doing a large object that's super-reflective chrome, no one will notice the reflections are cheated.

Remember, a 3D model can use the entire comp shot itself as the environment map--that wouldn't be a sphere, but it always looks good.

@Triem23 Thanks for the info! I discovered a downloadable 360 mode for my phone camera that seems to work decent enough. There are some harsh lines where the images don't quite line up, but that probably won't be visible as a reflection, plus I might blur the image a bit.

Also, is there a way to reduce a model's texture opacity in Hitfilm? The Dalek would look a lot nicer if the dirt textures weren't so intense. . .

I also discovered why your BB-8 reflections were upside down. It's because it was the index of refraction's reflection, not specular reflectivity reflection. In Hitfilm the IOR is an upside down reflection of the environment according to the manual linked above.

@Triem23 I can't find any good reference for a bronze material on any of the sites. Is there another similar material that will give a similar look to the bronze of the Daleks?

I have a handheld shot I tracked and solved of my living-room and a spherical panorama and I'm trying to get the Dalek looking like it was taken from the show, or at least realistic enough. I might share a clip of what I have so far.

@Triem23 sorry I saved a draft for the post as the video uploaded. When I came back to post it Hitfilm's site was acting up. There was no box here for me to type, and the page wasn't loading. Neither was the account page. Weird. I'll edit the above post now...

Yeah, there was a glitch on the forum earlier. Looks like they fixed it. :-)

Actually, not too many notes. I think I'm make the fill light off to the right a bit more blue to match the spill light from the window, and I feel the Dalek is a little short (The Bronze Dalek was built so it's eyestalk matched Billie Piper's eyes, so the eyestalk, when level, is about 5' 2" up). Maybe turn the fill light intensity down a bit? Looking at the couch it seems most of the light is coming from the lamp in the corner, although you might have light sources I can't see out of frame.

Ah, assign an environment map to the Dalek in the material settings for it's layer. Go ahead and use the Composite Shot it self. Double check and make certain there's specular reflectivity on the chrome parts. That should get some room reflections in the chrome of the eyestalk, sucker arm and gunstick.

Only other thing I can think of if maybe the diffuse color for the skirt and the cage of the neck. Those shouldn't be any darker than about 16,16,16 or so. They might need to be adjusted depending on whatever footage you're compositing into, but right now it's reading a little dark to me when compared to the deepest shadow of the footage and those picture frames on the right.

Otherwise, it's a really solid composition, and whatever grading you'd do later in the shot will finish unifying the Dalek with the BG plate.